Episode 1064 Scott Adams: Kamala's New Face, Kanye's Campaign, How Trump is Doing on Coronavirus
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Content:
Kamala Harris face
The "Cancel-Fly" buzzing around me, seeking stink
Chuck Todd, intentional HOAX promoter
Coronavirus results and leadership quality
Rob Smith: 5 Words to win the black vote
Kanye's Harriet Tubman comment
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Yeah, you'll miss the simultaneous sip, and you'll be worse off for it, but you won't know the difference.
You'll never know. Let's talk about all the news.
Number one, did you all see Kamala Harris's face?
What? If you haven't seen it, so apparently...
And this is speculation based on smarter people than me telling me what to think.
The speculation is that she had some fairly extensive facial cosmetic surgery.
Some are saying Botox.
But according to my smartest person who tells me things about this field, it looks like it wasn't Botox because she can still move her forehead.
It looks like it was probably an eye lift.
Very high likelihood of an eye lift.
And maybe some general face lifting and neck tightening.
So I think it's a neck, face, eye lift kind of thing according to the smartest person I know.
If you saw the pictures, you were probably kind of horrified, because it doesn't even look like a human being at this point.
It looks like there's something terribly, terribly wrong.
But the only thing wrong, as far as I can tell, is it's just early.
Meaning that what you're seeing is the aftermath with swelling, Of somebody whose nerves are not all quite functioning yet and just had some facial cosmetic surgery.
So, if it makes you feel better, should you wait about three weeks?
My expert tells me this.
She's going to look really good.
So if you're judging her now, which apparently is too close from the time that she had some surgery, I think you're seeing just the recovery look.
So you're seeing her look swelled and she can't move things yet.
But according to my best information, it's probably going to come out great.
And she'll probably just look 10 years younger.
It might help her out.
I think it was a very unusual choice to get this done when she did.
Very unusual choice because it does put her right in the middle of the summer when the nominations happen and all that.
So it almost feels like she's not going to be nominated anytime soon and maybe not at all because I just can't see her getting that surgery.
Now here's the interesting part.
Do you think she got the surgery only because it would make her look younger?
That would be the normal reason that one would do that.
Or, was it to change some features to also make her look more attractive and also younger?
Which is the other reason that anybody does such things.
Or, and here's the fun part, is there any kind of a tweak that is specifically political?
Now, and I'm just going to speculate because there's no evidence that anything like that happened.
But I did tell you that when she dropped out of the race for the top spot to win the primary, I did tell you that I predicted she would disappear for a while and come back reworked and improved.
Now, I was thinking in terms of her technique, which I think actually did get improved.
She doesn't do this self-conscious giggling as much, etc.
But the other thing she had working against her is she had sort of a stern face.
Can I say RBF? Do you all know what that means?
Resting B face.
And when she smiled, her face would really come alive.
But if she were looking stern, it was sort of a...
It's pretty stern. Is it possible...
I'm just going to ask the question.
Is it possible...
That somebody would get a cosmetic surgery that was optimized for getting rid of your RBF so that you would just look more approachable, more electable?
Could you change somebody's perceived personality by changing the physical look?
I think maybe yes.
I think maybe you could, actually.
I don't know if that was an objective or anything that's going to happen with Kamala Harris, but I think it's possible.
So it's a bold, bold move, I think.
It's bold because of the timing of it.
But if it works, and there's a good reason to think that in three weeks she's going to look terrific, and maybe younger than she looked before, maybe it'll work.
We'll see. There was a riot in Seattle outside of an Apple store and some, I guess, adjacent blocks.
And let's go check CNN to see the coverage of the riot in Seattle.
Click, click, click, click.
Nothing there. Nothing.
Like it didn't even happen.
Now you can see it on Fox News, but even then it's not a headline.
It's one of the lower, lower little mentioned stories below where you usually don't scroll to.
So even Fox News is downplaying it, but it seems like exactly the sort of thing that would be news.
So still don't know what's going on there.
So yesterday I said that the allegations against Roger Stone, that he used, let's say, an offensive racial word on a radio interview, I said, unless you've actually heard the audio, don't automatically assume that that actually happened.
Now we've heard the audio.
Have you all heard the audio?
It sure sounds like it happened.
I think Roger Stone's defense is that the audio was distorted or cut by the DJ or something happened.
But he basically says it didn't happen.
Here's my take on Roger Stone.
I was one of the more active blue checks, if you can say that.
Who were promoting for him to get pardoned or have his sentence commuted.
And so I was very happy to see that that happened.
However, Roger Stone, you're totally on your own now.
Whatever happens to you, Roger Stone, from this point on, you're on your own.
I do not have your back.
Sorry. Sorry.
Because if I put my reputation on the line to be, you know, part of many people trying to essentially lobby the president to let this guy out, and one week out of danger, legal jeopardy, and Roger Stone drops a big old turd on the president's head?
Indirectly. I mean, the president pardons this guy, and then he uses this language Which he should have known would be picked up.
He's on his own.
How can I support that or back it, explain it, apologize for it, or anything?
He's just on his own. So I disavow myself from all things Roger Stone, but I am glad he got his commutation.
I got a little...
Cancel fly after me today.
I think that's the new word I'm going to use.
The cancel flies, a fly like a little bug that flies around, are the people who try to buzz around people on social media just to see if there's a weakness there, just to see if they can attract some other flies.
Maybe if I say there's some stink over here, I'll get some more flies.
If I get enough flies, I can cancel this guy.
So this columnist for Chicago Sun-Times, have I ever mentioned that professional writers don't seem to like me?
If you're following the fun on Twitter, it's just one professional writer after another, or artist.
Artists and writers just come after me like crazy, and they always have the worst arguments.
So this guy, Neil Steinberg, columnist for Chicago Sun-Times, comes after me.
And I had tweeted that when people try to say what the president did wrong, that their responses sound funny.
All right, so this is what I said, and now I'm going to tell you how he misinterpreted me, and just for a laugh to see how badly it was.
So what I said is it's funny to hear people criticize the president because they don't do it in rational ways, so the way they do it is funny.
He turned that into, he tweets at me, 140,000 dead Americans, thanks to the response he bungled, meaning the president, is funny to you?
What? At what point did I say 140,000 dead people was funny to me?
That's not even close to what I said.
But here's a professional who can put that in a tweet, and somebody reads that, and they're going to think, My God, was this cartoonist laughing at the death of 140,000 people?
No. No.
I wasn't even talking about the deaths of 140,000 people.
I was talking about people's response to the president.
Completely different topic.
So, what's funny about this, besides the fact that writers are insanely bad at analyzing anything, Is that anybody thinks they can tell how well the president did on coronavirus?
So, I've taught you the high ground maneuver.
In the world of persuasion, it's just a name I give it.
But the high ground maneuver is when there's a debate going on, doesn't matter what the debate is, and if you can find the high ground point, it ends the debate.
Meaning that as soon as people hear your point, They think, oh yeah, I just have to pretend I'm on the same side now.
That's such a strong point.
And it's called the high ground because it takes you out of the weeds of the thing you're debating, in which nobody's going to change their mind, up to a higher point where there is no debate.
And it goes like this.
Do y'all like science?
Who likes science?
Raise your hands. Oh, I see that all of your hands are up.
That's right. Nobody dislikes science.
Now, there's lots of complaints about science being inaccurate on certain topics, etc.
But I think I can make this statement fairly confidently.
There's nobody who doesn't like science, right?
So science is the ultimate high ground, at least in our society.
So if you can take a conversation out of the weeds, And bring it up to, hey, I like science, you like science, why don't we be scientific?
Nobody can resist that, because they immediately look like an idiot for being anti-science.
You just can't stay in the weeds if somebody says science.
So here's what I did, both humorously and maybe as a lesson for you about how to handle these situations.
So there's lots of debate online about how President Trump Handled the coronavirus.
Now, most people have an opinion that President Trump did a good job handling the coronavirus in terms of his leadership, or he did a bad job, right?
And you've seen the debate online and in the news, and that's the weeds.
Did he do a good job?
Did he do a bad job on coronavirus?
Good job, bad job, good job, bad job.
That can never be resolved because it's all just opinion-y stuff.
Very opinion-y.
So what I did was I took it up to the high ground and I tweeted this.
And this is the fun part for today.
So I tweeted, the best example of unscientific thinking lately is that one can compare leadership across countries by looking at their coronavirus outcomes.
That isn't even close to being a thing.
So that's my high ground move.
It is not scientific thinking that To believe that you can compare how leaders did in this coronavirus situation from one country to another.
If you think you can do that, or that it's so obvious you don't need Scott, Scott, Scott, it's so obvious, you don't need a controlled study.
Just look at the graph.
United States graph looks like this.
South Korea looks like this.
Duh. Duh.
It's obvious. Just look at the outcomes.
Different leadership, different outcomes.
People who did similar kinds of things, good outcomes.
Scott, duh, duh.
It's as obvious as it could be.
Right? But it's not.
You can't compare leaders across different countries.
That's not a thing.
It can't be done. There's no science in the world that can do that.
The smartest scientists in the world could get together and try to study this, and they wouldn't even have the right data.
They would just look at it and say, well, thanks for inviting us here, but we don't really have the kind of data that would be able to sort this out.
Don't believe me yet? Let me run through some examples.
So just this morning, well, so here's the big problem.
You have different leaders, but they all have different countries.
You're going to ask me later, but wait, what about some of the Scandinavian countries?
They're similar-ish, right?
We'll get to that. Hold that thought.
I'm not forgetting it.
We'll get to it. Number one, how many other countries have fake news like we have in the United States?
I don't know. Do you know?
How many countries have free markets and fake news?
If I go to South Korea, Will I see two different versions of the news?
I don't actually know the answer to that question, do any of you?
If I go to South Korea and I'm flipping through the news channels, first of all, is there more than one?
I don't even know. Do you?
If I go to Sweden or some other country and I'm flipping through the channels, am I going to find an entire major news network that's just making stuff up?
Because we have that.
We have an entire major news network that literally is just making shit up.
You don't believe that?
You don't believe that our fake news literally just makes stuff up?
Well, did you watch Meet the Press, in which Chuck Todd, after the Kayleigh McEnany quote, had been completely debunked where she had allegedly said that we wanted to send kids back to school even if the science said otherwise.
But really, she said, we want to send kids back to school because the science says it's safe.
Everybody knows that that's what she said.
Everybody knows that the initial story was just grossly taken out of context to literally reverse its meaning From we want to be compatible with science to we're going to ignore science.
Days have passed since that story came, was debunked, and went away.
And even yesterday, NBC, Chuck Dodd, brought that story out like it was true.
As if it were true.
Days after it's been debunked on all the networks, except I guess his.
So, you don't think that he knew what he was doing?
You don't think that Chuck Todd and all the people involved in that production, you don't think they knew that they just made something up out of nothing?
Well, I used to think, well, maybe they're just confused.
Maybe there's some cognitive dissonance going on.
But this is one of those cases where you just can't believe that.
You just look at it and you go, Chuck, I'm pretty sure Chuck Todd watches the news.
I'm pretty sure he's noticed that even on CNN it got debunked.
Even Jake Tapper debunked it on CNN. And he still did it as if it had never been debunked.
There's no way that is anything but just intentionally putting on fake news.
There's no way I can see it any other way.
Now, is that the case in other stories?
And why does that matter?
Well, what did our news tell us?
Told us that hydroxychloroquine will kill you.
It told you that your president wanted to inject disinfectant or drink bleach or some damn thing.
That wasn't true.
So we have a fake news which has been completely discrediting our leadership in ways that are almost unbelievable.
Do other countries have that same situation?
Do they? Do they have that same situation?
So if I went to South Korea where they got a better result because they're Leadership was so good.
Do you think if I turn on the television, I'm going to get completely fake science?
Maybe. I don't know.
But I'll bet you don't know.
So if you're comparing those countries, that's a really big variable in how well your leader could even get people to do things.
How about face masks?
Do you think that the United States would have had, let's say, better results If President Trump had been more aggressive about face masks early on, maybe so, right?
But what advice was he following?
He was following medical advice that said face masks didn't work.
Turns out that was a big old lie.
Even Fauci now admits it.
But wasn't it the World Health Organization, the The Surgeon General, all these experts were telling us masks didn't work, and then they just reversed it and said they do work.
What did that do to the population of this country?
If you were a citizen in this country, and you knew that your news was completely unreliable, they're clearly lying to you about big medical stuff.
I mean, life and death stuff.
They're just lying to you.
And then they say masks don't work, And then they completely reverse it and say masks do work.
If you were in South Korea, what did you make of that whole situation?
If you were in South Korea, was there ever one moment when you, as a citizen of South Korea, were seriously considering that masks don't work?
I'll bet not.
I won't say nobody, but I'll bet the population of South Korea started out thinking masks work Because there's more of a culture of wearing them routinely.
And I think they stayed that way and they ended that way.
Now, if they didn't have fake news and they didn't have medical experts lying to them, was that because their leader was so good?
Was it because President Moon in South Korea was such a good leader?
Or was it because they don't have a fake news and they don't have an anti-mask They don't have this divide between the left and the right, where if the left says breathing is good, the right will say, well, we're not going to breathe then, and then they'll all die.
Does that exist in South Korea?
It's apples and oranges.
Part of the argument of why leadership has made such a difference is you'll see the graph that says the United States curve looks like this, and here are these other countries In which their curve looks like this.
And so based on the outcomes, one of them had better leadership.
And so I'm looking at the graph and I'm saying, huh, it's a two-dimensional graph.
How did they put hydroxychloroquine use in there with all the leadership?
They didn't. So hydroxychloroquine use Which you've seen other charts to show that they're highly correlated with the outcomes, right?
Now, I don't know if those other charts are true or not.
You know, I can't trust anything at this point.
But there's certainly indication that it's a major factor.
And that's just ignored.
Now, why is it that hydroxychloroquine would be so ignored in this country?
Well, again, the fake news, right?
As soon as it became sort of a Trump pill...
Do you think this country was going to use it as aggressively as other countries?
No. And we also didn't have a supply.
Do you know who did have a supply?
Germany. Germany had a supply because they have a company, Bayer, that makes it.
So if your country had a supply of hydroxychloroquine and they used it, are we comparing leadership from one country to the other?
Or are you comparing that one country had fake news and one didn't?
Because if we didn't have fake news, and we did have a factory that made hydroxychloroquine, probably would have used it more.
And maybe we have better results.
How about TB vaccinations?
Is that on your chart?
When you're seeing how each of the leaders is doing based on the outcomes of their coronavirus curves, where on the chart do you see Tuberculosis vaccinations because a new study just came out said that there's a very high correlation between the countries that routinely give these vaccinations and ones that don't because there's some thought that the vaccination that I think it might be a combo vaccination I don't know what it is it's the BCG vaccination But different countries have different policies about whether you universally get those or not.
In the United States, it is not the policy to universally get this vaccination, apparently, because we don't have a problem, I guess, with tuberculosis or something.
And it's a high correlation.
If you don't have that vaccination, you have much worse problems.
So where exactly...
Where exactly on that chart of coronavirus do we see the vaccination information?
You don't. And this study found that the number of vaccinations of this type, the BCG, reduced the number of reported cases in the country.
So would your leadership variable pick up the fact that your country doesn't have BCG? Vaccinations?
No. No, that would not be picked up.
Let me ask you this.
If Obama had been president when the coronavirus kicked in, this should just make you laugh.
I don't even have to finish it.
Do you think Obama would have been better at getting Republicans to wear face masks?
Raise your hand if you think that Obama would have been more successful in getting Republicans to wear face masks.
No. No.
Obama would be the worst choice for getting Republicans to wear face masks.
Because the moment that Obama said, wear a face mask, Republicans would start yelling, it's Sharia law!
It's Sharia law!
He's making us wear a scarf because the very next step is we're going to be a Muslim country.
There isn't any way that Obama could have gotten more compliance From Republicans wearing face masks.
Now, do I think that Trump has done a good job in getting people to wear face masks?
No, I don't. I do not think he did a good job there.
But I don't know that somebody else would have done a better job, if you know what I mean.
There's something about the character of the American public that is not comparable to Sweden.
Let me ask you this.
When we compare ourselves to other countries, do you take into account the, let's say, the independence of the American voter and how varied and different we are?
I mean, we are a melting pot, not just in ethnicity, but in political belief and every other kind of belief.
We have the most diverse public you can imagine.
Can you get a diverse public To all comply to anything?
Sort of no.
It's really hard.
Can you get a public that is very uniform to agree to something?
A lot easier. Do you think it's easier to get the Japanese public or the South Korean public to do something?
The Swedish public?
Probably. Although Sweden's a little more multicultural lately.
So that's not a factor.
Let me ask you this. If you just took one of these great leaders, let's say President Moon from South Korea, or Angela Merkel, who's being mentioned as a good leader in this regard, if you just took one of those leaders, and let's imagine that they spoke fluent English and they could run for president in the United States, could you just take that leader from that other country that did so well, put them in the United States, and they would also do well?
What do you think? How in the world would you know?
And if you don't know that, do you know anything?
Because how are you comparing the US leadership to any other leadership if you don't know the answer to this question?
If I take one of the good leaders from the other country who got a good result and just pluck them into the United States, would they have gotten a better result?
You don't know.
Here's the other thing you don't know.
In 2019, There was a stock picker, a financial manager, who had the best results of all the people who were professional stock pickers in 2019.
Just was the best of the best.
And we're talking about tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of stock pickers.
And one of them beat everybody else.
So you should put your money in that one, right?
If there was one stock picker who picked better stocks last year, and this was the most recent year, so that's the most reliable, right, what's happened recently, and they killed all the other people, so you should put your money with that one, right?
No. No.
If you think that that's true, then you don't understand how to analyze anything.
Somebody was going to be the number one stock picker of 2019.
Somebody was going to be.
Because lots of people were guessing and somebody was going to guess better than other people.
It was guaranteed that somebody would be at the top and somebody would be at the bottom just because there were lots of people doing lots of different things.
Some guessed right, some guessed wrong.
The only thing you know if you're looking at one year, which is what this whole coronavirus situation is, you're looking at months really, not even a year.
If you're looking at one point in time, And you're looking at the result, you don't know anything.
You don't know anything.
You only know that in this fog of war...
Let me give you a better picture.
There are five different wars that break out in different places at the same time.
And in each of those cases, the country being attacked is in complete fog.
And they don't even know which way the enemy is.
Now, if you're being attacked, and you're in complete fog, and you don't know where the enemy is, you're still going to fire back.
But you don't know where you're firing.
So the people in Sweden said, I don't know where to fire, but I'll fire this way.
Bang, bang, bang, bang. Another country said, I don't know where the enemy is, but I'll fire this way.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And one of them hits the enemy.
One of them, just by complete luck, fired into the fog and hit the enemy.
Are they the good leadership one?
No, no.
They're the ones who fired into the fog and got lucky.
In the beginning of this coronavirus situation, all of our data was wrong.
All of our assumptions were wrong.
Pretty much everything we knew, we didn't really know.
It was changing, the experts were disagreeing.
What was the good leadership thing to do in that situation?
Well, when it's all done, Because we're dumb, we will look at who had the best result based on whatever metric we decide to look at, and we're going to say that one was the good leader.
It won't be true.
It won't even be close to true.
It will be the leader who fired into the fog and got lucky.
Because nobody knew what to do.
If everybody knew what to do, you would have seen people doing largely the same stuff.
And there was a pretty big variation in what people did.
Now the other thing that people say is, Scott, Scott, Scott, you can look at Sweden and you can see that they're having higher infections because they didn't do a full close down.
It was more of a, you know, just be smart sort of situation.
Whereas similar Scandinavian countries, they didn't do what Sweden did and they have lower infection, therefore they're the better leadership, right?
Right? That's pretty clear.
Because the Scandinavian countries are somewhat comparable in a lot of ways.
And one went one way and got a bad result.
And everybody told them.
Everybody told Sweden.
Hey Sweden, Sweden. We're all smart.
You're not. So if you do that approach, you're going to have high infections.
And that's not going to work out for you.
And then Sweden went into it and they got high infections.
Just like everybody said.
Everybody told them you're going to get high infections if you do it the way you're doing it, and they did.
So Sweden's the bad one, right?
No. No.
If you think you can conclude that, you don't know how to analyze stuff.
Because it's only halftime.
We're literally at the halftime of the game.
You don't know how Sweden's going to turn out, do you?
In your mind, have you said, oh, Sweden's making a mistake, Because we're all going to get to the end of the coronavirus at the same time, and when we get there, Sweden will have more deaths.
Because on the day that it's all over, it'll all be over, and then we're all done, and we'll count up our deaths, and they'll just have more of them.
So that's a bad job for Sweden, right?
No. We don't know that's what's going to happen.
We don't know that there will be an effective vaccination.
We don't know if there will be a number of vaccinations and some work better than others.
We don't know when that's going to happen.
And we don't know as much as we'd like to know about herd immunity.
For example, it seems that some people have some kind of natural immunity.
And there's some evidence that some people who have just been exposed to other coronaviruses might just not get it.
Now, if it's true that exposure to other coronaviruses gives you a measure of protection, how many people need to get the coronavirus to reach herd immunity?
You don't know, do you?
Right. Here's the cake in the pants.
If it's true that these other coronaviruses give you some protection against this coronavirus, it could be that herd immunity happens at closer to 20% infection because there are still, let's say, 40% of the public has that other coronavirus protection.
If you add the 40% that have this natural protection, To the 20% who gained immunity by getting it, suddenly you're at 60% immunity.
And if Sweden gets there first, did they lose or did they win?
Because the way it's looking, everybody's going to get to about the same level of infection for whatever their country is going to ultimately get infected.
Because we're not going to stop international travel Do you think New Zealand is the smart one?
Oh, New Zealand's pretty smart because they wiped it out on their island.
Well, it's kind of easy if you're an island.
You know, good luck New Zealand and good luck Hawaii and good luck Taiwan.
They all came out pretty well, right?
Because it's harder to get there by travel.
So, here's my bottom line in that.
Sweden could, there's still a possibility, I'm not predicting this, I'm just saying that one of the outcomes is that Sweden will look like the smartest one when it's all done.
Now, you're saying to yourself, every expert disagrees with that, Scott.
Because they're doing so poorly in the middle of it, how in the world could they ever end up being the best one?
And I just told you.
We don't know. But if it turns out that part of the public is immune, Sweden is going to get to herd immunity first with an economy that's still relatively functional.
That's not a bad result.
So if you think you can compare, you can't.
When you saw the graphs of which countries are doing better or worse on coronavirus, where was the variable of vitamin D? Where was that on the chart?
Do all the countries have the same amount of vitamin D? Do all the citizens have the same amount?
That's a pretty big variable, we think.
Alright, so if you don't know about vitamin D, you don't know about hydroxychloroquine, you don't know about the differences in how states have power in the United States because, you know, we don't have a dictator.
The states have to have their say.
The governors were very involved.
If you don't know that, you don't know about herd immunity, you just can't compare leaders.
You just can't. So I would say that the only thing we can measure right now in the United States is if our hospitals still have capacity.
The only thing that seems like a reliable indicator to me is that you kept your hospital and your healthcare system open.
So I would say that if we get to the end of this, Every country that kept their healthcare systems alive did well.
And every country that did not, if they lost their healthcare system to the point where other people were dying because they just couldn't get healthcare, then I would say those are failures.
But short of that, I don't know if there's any other measure that's going to be as useful as you think for sussing out who the good leaders are.
And then, let's see, I saw on Fox News one of their commentators saying that the way for Trump to win the black vote, which of course would be a lot, would be five words.
And I forget who said it.
I would like to name the person who said this because I like it.
But on Fox News, and the five words were a school choice for black Americans.
Now, I think it would have to be a school choice for all Americans.
Or is that racist?
I don't know. It's hard to tell anymore.
But I agree with that.
And here's how Trump could win despite all of the George Floyd-ing and Black Lives Matter and protests and all this.
And it's the high ground maneuver.
Trump could say, for example, we should do everything we can To decrease the number of times a citizen has a bad encounter with the police.
So Trump can certainly agree with the general statement that police should not be killing people, they should not be killed.
So it's easy to agree with such a generic thing.
But then he could also say, as I've said, hey, black America, it's your smallest problem.
Because if he says it's your smallest problem, It sort of forces everybody to look at the data again, which would prove that it's literally the smallest problem.
The biggest problem is everything else.
Thank you. Rob Smith is the commentator on Fox News who said that Trump could win the black vote by five words, school choice for black Americans.
He is so exactly right because school choice...
is the lever that makes everything else happen.
If you get the school choice right, then over time you can get good education, and the people who could get out do get out.
At least you'd have a pathway for that to happen.
I would argue that black Americans do not have the same opportunity as a lot of other people because their early school situation is so bad.
Now, you're going to throw on top of that, what about the family situation?
And here's my take on that.
You just can't fix that.
The family decisions, decisions to have a nuclear family with a mom and a dad and not get divorced and they both take care of the kids and all that, you can't change that.
So you can want that to be different all you want, but it's irrelevant for policy decisions because it's not going to change.
There's no... Lever that you can push from government that's going to change those kinds of personal choices.
So you have to build a system in which you can succeed anyway.
And the best you can do is school choice.
Because you could have kind of a bad home situation and still have an escape hatch.
That wouldn't work for everybody, you know, because every situation is different.
But at least you'd have an escape hatch.
You know, the kids who really, really, really wanted to get out could just pay attention in school, and they would have a pretty clear path out.
I think the president could make that claim and say, stop looking at your lowest priority.
Republicans are working on your highest priority, and the Democrats are distracting you with shiny objects, which are important, and we're not minimizing the need to decrease police violence.
And, you know, he's open to any suggestions about somebody piloting something.
If somebody wants to try, you know, a different way of policing, just try a small.
You know, don't try it in New York City.
That's maybe not where you want to experiment with stuff.
So I think the president has, like, the strongest, strongest argument, which is stop working on your smallest priority.
Education is your biggest priority, and Republicans are the only ones who offer school choice, and there's no other plan to get there.
The Democrats are not offering the alternate plan.
They're not. They're offering no plan.
Because if they're not fixing the school situation, they're ignoring the base problem that affects all the other problems.
You know, are you going to have as many black motorists stopped by police and ultimately Beaten up or killed if black income and white income were similar.
Right? Not as much.
Because as incomes go up, crime presumably will go down.
Any amount of racism or bias that the police might have would be reduced because then they're going to look and say, okay, this is a low-crime population and In their biased pattern recognition brains, they're going to say, this should go well.
And then it does.
So, you've got some weird questions in the comments there.
Somebody says, boomer parents didn't teach kids common sense.
You know, I don't know if it's common sense.
I have a question that I've wondered for some time.
I feel that the most useful thing that happened to me as a kid was being forced to work from the moment I could.
So from, I don't know, age 11 years old or something, if you could do anything useful, you know, clean something, mow something, shovel something, if you could do anything, you would get paid for it.
And you learn this habit of working equals getting stuff.
So my internal code, my operating system, just says if I want something, that's a function of the work I do.
And that's it. That's my whole model of life, because that's how I was raised.
Now imagine you're a kid who doesn't work and never gets paid for anything.
And then you go into the world, and the first time you're introduced to the idea of working for money, because you need it, is when you're 21.
How does that turn out?
Or 18 if you're not going to college.
I would think you'd be really handicapped.
And my observation is that kids today are far less likely to go out and get a job.
and those that haven't done that are deeply, deeply disadvantaged in my opinion.
Scott grew up in Indonesia, New York, No. I don't even know what that means.
I grew up in upstate New York, if that's what you meant.
Why can't artists think clearly?
Well, some of it, I think, is self-sorting.
So, the people who decide to become artists for a living probably also know, again, this is just a generality, doesn't apply to every person, But don't you think they generally know that they're not going to make it in STEM? Their mind is not organized like an engineer or a scientist.
If it were, maybe they'd be attracted to those things because that's just naturally what they were good at.
But if you're naturally good at creativity and art, it makes sense that you'd say, well, maybe I'll be an artist for a living.
And then those people just don't have minds that are optimized for decision making.
Likewise, the people who have minds that are optimized for decision making probably are not going to be able to create great art.
Probably not going to make a hit song.
Probably not going to write the novel that you want to read.
So we have different people.
So some of it is just the people who are not good at analyzing.
Have chosen the profession that optimizes what they are good at, just like everybody else.
So I think it could be that simple.
But on top of that, if you take a certain path in life, you're also not exposed to how to make decisions.
It is not common sense to know to overlook sunk costs.
It is not common sense to know that you can't tell how a leader is doing by looking at the result.
It's not common sense.
Because your so-called common sense would say, well, obviously I can look at a president, I can see what the outcome is, and then I know if it was a good president.
Duh! An artist could do that.
It's just obvious. There he is.
There's the result. It's his fault.
But if you learned even a little bit about decision-making, you would know that the only way you could know if your leader was doing a good job is to have multiple tests with multiple different leaders In identical situations, who are unaware of the other leaders and are independently making decisions, and some of them are better than others, and then you have to repeat that for year after year to find out if it was luck or if one person can repeat good decisions.
You are so far away from having any data that would tell you a leader is doing a good or bad job that you can't even walk there so far away.
All right. Somebody says, my friends who are artists and musicians are ultra-liberal.
Now, I think there also is a tendency to be liberal, and I don't know exactly what's behind that, but let me give you at least a hypothesis.
So I don't think this explains it all, but it might explain some of it.
My observation is that conservatives And engineers and scientists have something in common, which is they see the world in terms of systems.
And some people don't see systems, they see goals.
A goal would be everybody is happy and equal.
That would be a goal.
A system would be democracy.
A system would be capitalism.
But they're very imperfect systems, right?
And they give you a lot of unequal results.
But nobody has a better system than either one of those.
So it's just the best system we have, so what are you going to do?
So I think a scientist, an engineer, and a conservative would all look at the whole system.
Likewise, when you're looking at the coronavirus situation, do you not, correct me if I'm wrong, but is it not the conservatives who are looking at the whole system?
They're saying, Hey, it's not just health.
The economy is part of health.
The economy is part of defense.
You can't have a strong defense with a weak economy.
So I think conservatives are seeing the whole system.
They're seeing you need free markets, you need democracy, you need better news than fake news.
If you have those things in place, it's the best you can do.
If somebody comes up with a better system, open to hearing.
Who wouldn't want to hear about a better system?
Of course. Would you be willing to test a different system to see if it works, if you're a conservative?
Why wouldn't you be? If it's a small test?
Sure. Let's just see if it works.
Let's see if the system works.
Artists tend to be a little bit more focused on outcomes, a little less feeling the system as a machine.
And they're looking more at the individual, I think, and the individual situations.
Somebody says, Jordan Peterson sees it as different temperaments, open or closed.
Could be. Yeah, but I see it as more of a, you like systems or you don't.
I would say that the people who like systems end up being on the same side.
And it doesn't matter what else is true, if you can appreciate a system, you're probably on the same side with all the other people who do, no matter what their profession is.
Take a look at Kanye, which we need to talk about, which somehow I forgot to talk about Kanye.
How is that possible? Let's talk about Kanye.
So Kanye, my guess is, this is without knowing anything about his process, My guess is that he's got systems that allow him to do all the different things he's doing, which looks overwhelming.
If you look at the output and his creativity, and then he's running, you know, businesses with his clothing stuff, etc.
He's doing design, he's building experimental shelters.
I mean, he's all over the place, but he seems to make it work.
Don't you think he has a system, or probably a series of systems?
I guarantee it. He has systems.
Now, that's what makes him not just an artist, but an artist who is commercially successful.
It's the system part, I think, that makes the difference.
Now, don't you notice that Kanye is a little more open to the Republican worldview?
He is, right?
And it's because of the system part.
What is Kanye introducing to the political process?
Now, if you don't see that, you're missing the best part.
Kanye is trying to run as a, let's say, a Christian system candidate.
In other words, he's not just bringing himself, he's bringing his system.
His system is some form of Christianity, which I think you would probably, you know, want to open the definition to something spiritual, so that it's not limited to a specific religious, you know, I believe Kanye is trying to bring a new system which is reinvigorating the religious model because it's a good system.
Now, I of course have a little problem with that as a major platform because I do like the idea of separating church and state, but as soon as I say that, In the same sentence, without stopping for a comma or a period, I must say that our current system, even though it looks like we're separating church and state, that's sort of a trick.
The United States is just a Christian country with a bunch of laws that are compatible with Christianity for the most part.
You know, you can argue about abortion, but mostly compatible.
And anything that was not compatible with Christianity is going to have a hard time becoming a law in our country.
So as a general, it's not true in every single way, but as a generality, we've always been a Christian country.
We just don't try to play it up so much.
So is Kanye's approach of bringing an entire belief system into government Is it good?
Is it healing? Is it unifying?
It might be. Religion is one of the few things that does unify in our country, and black, white, brown, everything in between tend to be more religious than not.
So I don't know that Kanye is going to win in 2020.
Seems like he's going to have some problems with getting on all the ballots and everything else.
But in terms of what he's bringing to the conversation, it's always bigger than you think.
And other people have speculated this, and I think it's perfectly safe and true and fair to say, which is I don't think he cares if he wins.
Meaning that he has a system in which he can win or he can lose, and he will come out ahead.
If Kanye runs for president and does not win, does he come out ahead?
Yeah, he does. Number one, he's immediately in the conversation for 2024, which would be a far more potential for him to win.
So this is just part of the system for 2024.
Put yourself in the ring, see what happens, see if you like it, see what people say, then adjust for the next one.
So that's smart.
What if he runs for president, doesn't win, and also doesn't run in 2024?
Still smart, because he's promoting a new album.
He has a new album out.
So the worst case scenario is that everybody finds out Kanye has a new album out, and it becomes another number one album, which is likely to happen.
So he's going to be pushing his A spiritual, let's say, unifying message, which I'm all for.
I think Kanye would be taking a demotion to be President of the United States, honestly, because he's already bigger than that.
I just don't know if he knows it yet.
As big as Kanye's ego is, which is one of the things I like about him, he doesn't hide the fact that when things are going well for him, he can pump up his ego to enormous standards.
But at the same time, he can bring it down and say, hey, people were making fun of me for my weight, so I got some surgery.
So he can expand and he can contract like crazy.
So he uses it as a tool, which is what I advise you you should do.
There are times when you want to expand your ego so that you can bring your performance up to it.
And then there are times when it's just socially gross to have your ego out there, so you need to shrink it down just to get along with other people.
I see him doing that.
So Kanye's bringing something valuable and important he can't lose.
He doesn't have a loss vector in this.
I suppose he could say some things about Harriet Tubman that people don't like that'll be misinterpreted.
Let me tell you how I think he was misinterpreted yesterday.
So, Kanye said at a gathering that was described as sort of a campaign stop, but maybe it wasn't, in South Carolina, that he made this weird statement, weird according to most people, but not me, that Harriet Tubman freed the slaves, but she only freed them to go work for white people.
And everybody said, oh, I'm out, I'm out.
Kanye is saying, Incorrect things about history and slavery.
We've been here before.
Kanye, do your homework.
Don't you know that Harriet Tubman did in fact risk her life multiple times to save hundreds of slaves?
There's no question about it.
It happened. But that has nothing to do with what Kanye said.
Let me tell you how I interpret what he said.
What I heard him say was that Harriet Tubman freed the slaves But what are they going to do?
You're a freed slave.
What are you going to do? Get a job with a white person.
And then you have the beginning of white supremacy and racial inequality that will just go through the generations.
Because the person who owns the company, the white person who owns the company, He's going to have richer white kids because he owns the company.
The person who works for that guy is just a laborer.
That person's kids are going to be a big disadvantage.
So what I heard Kanye say is that ending slavery, excellent.
But all it did was bring you to the next level of problem, which is you all have bad jobs working for white people, and if you fast-forward that a few hundred years in the future, it might still look like that.
It might still look like that a few hundred years later, and that's where we are.
So, was Kanye even saying anything that was outside of the most basic belief that pretty much everybody has?
No. No.
What Kanye said, in my mind...
Was perfectly historically accurate and was important and fit the moment and read the room correctly.
And then he was taken out of context like an idiot because that's what happens, right?
So the left is going to hate Kanye because he might take votes away from Biden.
And I think the right appreciates him.
I've told you many times that Communication only works if people understand your intentions.
If they think your intentions are wrong, it doesn't matter what words come out of your mouth, nobody can hear it.
They're only hearing your intentions and then they're reinterpreting your words to fit their assumption about your intentions.
The one thing everybody is sure of with Kanye, what's the one thing you're sure of?
He's doing it for the right reason.
Were the Democrats all sure that Trump was running for president for the right reasons?
No, they weren't.
They felt that maybe Trump had some personal agenda.
When you see Biden running, if you're a Republican, do you think that Biden is running for the right reasons?
I don't. I don't even know if he's making his own decisions.
It seems like there's some kind of You know, the coup planners in the deep state and the people who want power.
It just feels like it's money and power and he's sort of a puppet.
It just feels unclean, doesn't it?
There's just something about the whole Biden situation that doesn't feel right.
Now, compare how you feel about Biden.
I don't even know if he's making decisions.
Compare how you feel about Trump, if you're on the left anyway.
The people on the right know this is ridiculous because The worst financial thing that Trump could have ever done is run for president.
I think we know that on the right, because it's bad for all of us financially, it seems.
But now compare that to Kanye.
What is Kanye's intention?
It looks positive.
I don't think Kanye has any negative intentions.
I don't think anybody owns him.
I don't think he's beholden to anybody.
I think he does a genuine, completely pure love for the country and a desire to make things better and maybe a little bit of a God complex that, you know, he's the one who's gonna make it happen.
But, you know, if you get a leader who doesn't have a little bit of a God complex, I don't know how far they're gonna go.
I really don't.
Having a little bit of a God complex He's pretty highly correlated with effective leadership.
So that's the part I kind of like about Kanye, and it's honest and it's out there.
Now, there'll be lots of conversations about his mental health, his admitted bipolar situation, etc., and those are good conversations to have.
I think that's very healthy to have that.
All right. Somebody says, can I be your Kanye pundit?
There's going to be a lot of those. You can all be Kanye pundits.
All right. Somebody says, zero interest in his policies because he's not conservative.
I would wait on that.
I don't know if you're ever going to hear any Kanye policies.
It may be that you'll never hear it.
It would not surprise me because this is the way I would run for president if I were Kanye.
And I think in this one way, I feel like I can anticipate him.
Not in general, because he's so creative that you just don't know where he's going to go at any moment.
But in this one way, I think I can anticipate him.
And that, probably, if he gets pushed on policies, he's going to describe a system instead.
So I think he will tell you the system he will use to make decisions as opposed to what that decision will be.
If he does that, That you have a real system-thinking person, and that's kind of special.
